Modern electronic components are being manufactured with ever increasing packaging densities which require greatly increased power dissipation capabilities. Proper cooling and power dissipation greatly enhance reliability of the electronic components, and thus thermal management is becoming an extremely important design consideration. Because of the high heat fluxes produced by modern high powered electronic components, future high power electronics for commercial aircraft, aerospace installations, and other applications will likely be liquid cooled.
In such applications where space and weight are important, compact cold plates and modular device coolers are needed. Further, the cooling devices should be low cost and provide high performance cooling of the electronic components, such as solid state power devices used in variable speed, constant frequency power generation systems, DC converters, motor drives, inverters, variable frequency converters and bidirectional converters.
In applications employing high power electronic devices, high performance liquid plate fin heat exchangers or impingement type coolers have been used. Such devices have surface density ranges on the order of 500-1000 and 1500-2500 square meters of surface area per cubic meter of exchanger volume, respectively. Cooling devices with even greater surface density have been developed.
However, because cooling requirements vary substantially from application to application, prior cooling devices have either been individually designed for a specific application, or else an existing cooling device having a known cooling performance equal to or greater than the cooling requirements of the contemplated application must be chosen. In the former case, the need to develop a new design can increase overall costs beyond an acceptable level. In the latter case, inefficiencies are often encountered due to the oversizing of the cooling device. In either case, efficiency could be increased by providing a modular coolant manifold adapted to accept any one of a variety of cooling devices.